I am happy to announce that we are convening a workshop at the Center for Advanced Studies at the LMU Munich for 26. - 27. June 2017.

The workshop tries to explore current trends and challenges for democratic policy-making. Specifically, the workshop is motivated by the observation that in response to societal demands and problem-solving requirements, all modern democracies have piled up an enormous number of laws, policies, and public programs over the years that deeply affect all aspects of life and even death for their citizens. At the same time, however, the steady accumulation of rules and policies also creates challenges for three cornerstones of democractic governance: the ability to implement and enforce public policies, the ability to evaluate policies' effectiveness, and the ability to have sophisticated policy debates in the public arena. We are looking forward to discuss these issues with the following workshop participants: Christian Breunig (Konstanz / CAS Visiting Fellow), Isabelle Engeli (Bath / CAS Visiting Fellow), Peter John (University College London), Fritz Sager (Bern), Esther Versluis (Maastricht), and Frank Nullmeier (Bremen).

My colleagues and I want to thank the Cologne Institute for Economic Research for this year's award for the best published paper on the topic of bureaucracy. Our paper has attempted to measure the extent of rule growth across 23 OECD countries in the areas of environmental and social policy over a period of 30 years. We find that those countries which are perceived to have rather weak executives and administrative structures have been subjected to a particularly strong growth of rules in this area. This is potentially worrisome as it raises of question of whether this will not give rise to systematically expanding implementation deficits.